Will Thomas Mann’s House Be Demolished?

Thomas Mann with his wife, Katia, and their grandchildren at the house where he wrote “Doctor Faustus,” in Pacific Palisades.

Photograph by AP

When Arnold Schoenberg settled in Brentwood, California, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, he found himself living across the street from Shirley Temple. Ronald Schoenberg, one of the composer’s sons, recalls that tour buses would pass by, with a voice on a loudspeaker pointing out the child star’s home. The guides invariably failed to mention that the arch-magus of musical modernism, the codifier of the twelve-tone method of composition, lived on the same block. “My father was always a little sad about that,” Ronald once told me.

I like to imagine that, in some alternate universe, tour buses are trundling around Los Angeles, showing gawkers the homes of a different class of celebrity—not the stars of the silver screen but the stars of music, literature, and philosophy, members of that extraordinary constellation of European émigrés who took refuge in Southern California during the Nazi period. “On your right, the home of Igor Stravinsky, the composer of ‘The Rite of Spring.’ . . . That little white house belongs to the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. . . . Here’s the composer of ‘Pierrot Lunaire,’ watering his garden!”

It’s not pure fantasy. Maps of émigré homes float around the Internet, and Cornelius Schnauber’s book “Hollywood Haven” proposes a series of tours. Sometimes intellectual tourists are so bold as to knock on doors. Geoff Dyer, in his new book, “White Sands,” recounts what happened when he called at the former home of Theodor W. Adorno, the author of “Minima Moralia” and “Negative Dialectics,” on South Kenter Avenue, in Brentwood. “The writer? The philosopher?” the tenant asks, when Dyer mentions Adorno’s name. “I must find out more. How do you spell ‘Adorno’ again?”

When, some years ago, I made my own tour of émigré haunts, the one that I most wanted to see was at 1550 San Remo Drive, in Pacific Palisades. Here, from 1942 to 1952, lived Thomas Mann, in a house built to his specifications. Here was written “Doctor Faustus,” a book that had an overpowering effect on me when I first read it. The tale of a composer in league with the devil, it bears the full weight of Mann’s grief, rage, and shame at what had happened in his native Germany. The house was hidden by tall trees and hedges: I had the strange sense that the author was still there, imagining a ravaged spiritual landscape as he looked out over his avocado grove at the Pacific.

The house at 1550 San Remo is now for sale, at a list price of just under fifteen million dollars—rather high for a five-thousand-square-foot house on one acre. Remarkably, the property was last on the market in 1953, when a lawyer named Chester Lappen bought it from Mann for fifty thousand dollars. The real-estate listing, which makes no mention of Mann, invites buyers to “create your dream estate.” As the architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, the house is effectively being marketed as a “teardown”: it is considered less valuable than the parcel of land on which it sits.

The threat of demolition has caused an outcry in Germany, where Mann’s reputation is as exalted as it has ever been. Jürgen Kaumkötter, a curator of persecuted art, has proposed that the German government buy the house and fund it as a writers’ retreat, along the lines of the Villa Aurora, the former home of the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, also in Pacific Palisades. Failing that, there is hope that a culturally sensitive buyer will come forward, as happened with the Brecht house in Santa Monica. The “magic villa” on San Remo, as the German press calls it, is more than the home of a great writer: it is a symbol of a fraught period in American history, one that gave a refugee from Nazism feelings of déjà vu.

Mann bought the land in September, 1940—“a property with seven palms and many citrus trees,” he wrote to his brother Heinrich. For seven years he had been a wanderer; when the Nazis took power, he was away on a lecture tour (“The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner”), and within a few months he had lost possession of the palatial home in Munich that he had occupied for twenty years. Like many émigrés, he struggled to find his place in American culture, but he grew to like the Mediterranean tinge of life in Southern California, the transfiguring quality of the light. He would go on long walks and was not averse to gazing at young male bodies on the beach.

Mann called the building project a “reckless and self-willed prank,” but dreamed of creating an environment suited to his “habits, needs, demands.” At first he consulted with the great California modernist Richard Neutra, but eventually he turned to J. R. Davidson, who was more sympathetic to the nostalgic streak in Mann’s temperament. The result was a compromise between Romantic and modern elements—almost an architectural mirror of Mann’s writing. “I shall, Heil Hitler, have the finest study I have ever worked in,” he wrote. He first sat there on February 14, 1942. By 1944, he was writing to Edvard Beneš, the exiled president of Czechoslovakia, “I do not think I shall give up the home I have built here by the Pacific, the home which I have come to love and which is so favorable for my work.” He seemed ready to die there.

No tour buses made their way up San Remo Drive, but occasionally fans would appear on Mann’s doorstep. One day, a teen-age boy called on the phone, having found the author’s number under “M” in the phone book. He and his female friend were invited to tea. A pleasant but awkward conversation ensued, with Mann asking the kids about their studies and answering questions about his work. “Both the heights and the depths of the German soul are reflected in its music,” Mann said, apropos of “Doctor Faustus,” his latest work. “Wagner,” the girl sagely replied. She was Susan Sontag, and four decades later she recounted the episode in a story for this magazine. One delightful detail is that Sontag and her friend, Merrill, arrived two hours early and sat in their car a little ways from the house, rehearsing their encounter with the “god in exile.”

When Franklin Roosevelt died, in 1945, Mann sensed that the liberal, cosmopolitan America that had welcomed him might not survive. Anti-Communist witch hunts soon fulfilled his fears. In 1949, he found himself included, alongside Einstein, Chaplin, and Lillian Hellman, in a Life_ _magazine spread of “Dupes and Fellow Travelers”—a “strange rogues’ gallery,” he called it. Articles appeared with titles like “The Moral Eclipse of Thomas Mann” and “Thomas Mann’s Left Hand.” McCarthyite America increasingly reminded him of Germany in the late Weimar period. The feeling of encroaching apocalypse became acute when, early one morning in 1951, a trembling of the ground and a glow on the horizon signalled an atomic test in the Nevada desert.

Dread consumed him: he thought he might be trapped in America, even imprisoned. The fear may seem irrational in retrospect, but Mann had intimate knowledge of how a civilized society could turn feral in an instant. By 1952, he and his wife, Katia, had decided that they must emigrate again, this time to Switzerland. They last saw the house on San Remo Drive in June of that year, though it did not sell for many months. They settled in Zurich; there Mann died, in 1955. In his last years, he kept thinking back to his life in Pacific Palisades. Looking at old photographs made him heartsick: “The house was so completely my own.”

Chester and Jon Lappen, the longtime residents of 1550 San Remo, took pride in the fact that they lived in Mann’s former home. They installed a plaque, with text in English and German, advertising the connection. When Chester died, in 2010, the house remained in the family. “A sale is not under discussion for us,” one of the Lappen heirs told Die Welt in 2012. Evidently, the situation has changed.

Perhaps the juggernaut of the real-estate market is destined to roll over the Mann house as it has over many other notable places. Worse things will have happened in the world. But for anyone who loves Mann’s work, or who cherishes the story of émigré culture in Los Angeles, it would be a crushing outcome. Other landmarks will remain—the Schoenberg home in Brentwood, for one, is immaculately preserved—but the levelling of 1550 San Remo would feel almost like the obliteration of an era. “Where I am is Germany,” Mann famously said. That other Germany, the realm of the deepest-questing spirit, deserves to keep a foothold on American soil.

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.